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Fordlandia: Big Rubber Balls

I'm prurient by nature, and thus love to see folks taken down by hubris. This has made my study of the domestic automobile industry here at Stick Shift quite compelling of late. The new book Fordlandia,by Greg Grandin, tells a Big Three hubris story for the ages, but this one is set in the early part of last century. The non-fiction book covers the nearly 20-year period during which Henry Ford attempted to found a rubber plantation on 5,625 square miles of northern Brazilian rain forest, resulting in an epic cluster-fuck. Not only did the plan fail spectacularly on the raw-material-production front, it was also hugely unsuccessful in its efforts to bring Ford's socially-engineered vision of Midwestern America to the heart of the Amazon. Paging Mr. Kurtz!

In addition to exposing Ford's pet peccadilloes—hatred of unions, cities, and particularly Jews—the book offers an intelligent analysis of the way Ford's bifurcated vision of America influenced the development of modern American industrial capitalism (as well as our current post-post-industrial situation). Ford based his success on mechanization and the rational, efficient implementation of mass production, but he idealized an earlier age, when things were simple and handmade. He treated humans as replaceable cogs in his industrial machine, but worshiped a time when relationships were personalized and organized around community. He was a proponent of the transformative powers of individualism, but acted paternalistic and patronizing toward his employees, forcing them to conform to his often outlandish standards of behavior—banning cow's milk, alcohol, and any sort of bodily contact while dancing—and even going so far as to empower a goon force in his company that acted, often brutally, to enforce his edicts: beating union organizers bloody, shooting into protesting crowds of hungry workers.

Grandin uses the Brazilian settlement as a "parable of [Ford's] arrogance," but threads in a social history of Ford's analogous efforts throughout his life. More than anything else, the book shows how Ford was responsible for unleashing "the power of industrialism to revolutionize human relations" and how he "spent most of the rest of his life trying to put the genie back into the bottle, to contain the disruption he himself let loose." The man comes across as a petty, proudly anti-intellectual tyrant, increasingly beholden to his own fetishistic vision, and surrounded solely by people who supported this. In other words, he was a dim-witted zealot. And like most dim-witted zealots—our previous president included—there's a thrilling schadenfreude involved in watching them fail, but one that's tempered by the knowledge of the long-lasting effects of their efforts. If in a slightly, though excitingly, polemical way, the book demonstrates how distinctly American Fordism is, and how distinctly Fordistic America is.